Help

You can do more than just browse the 180k or so messages in the archive.

  • When browsing by date or thread, you can search for particular content on your favorite search engine.
  • When browsing by date you can search message content.
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  • When viewing a message, you can associate one or more topics with that message.
  • You can browse the current set of topics.

Searching

You can search the full archive using your favorite search engine and its search syntax. The default search engine is Brave, but Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are also supported. If you would like to see some other search engine available, let me know.

You can also search a fairly crude index of the mail messages in the database. This is far from perfect, but allows you to browse messages on a particular topic chronologically. For example, you might try searching for Ernesto Colnago. You can also search for messages from particular people using the from: prefix. For example, Brian Baylis was quite active in the early CR days. You can find his posts with from:Brian Baylis. (This is not perfect. You can't currently search for users by email address.)

Browsing or Adding Topics

The archive is huge and is really not organized in a useful way. While filters help cut down on the sheer number of messages you need to consider when scanning the archive for messages of interest, a more permanent method of organization is called for. The archive has a user-maintained set of hierarchical topics. You can view existing topics, or (when viewing an individual message you find interesting) suggest one or more topics that message might apply to. Consider this message: reynolds 531 SL tubing and heavier riders. You will see it's already associated with two Framebuilding:Norris Lockley. You can suggest other topics to which that message might apply, say, "Framebuilding:Reynolds Tubing," by entering that in the "Add Topic(s)" field and hitting RETURN or pressing the "Submit" button. Hierarchy is indicated by using a colon (":") to separate more general topics from more specific subtopics. If you want to define multiple topics for a given message, separate them with commas.

This is a very new feature (as of Feb 2022). At some point it might need further refinement.

Skip Montanaro, Dec 2022